


Must it maintain

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Jewel in the Crown (TV), The Raj Quartet - Paul Scott
Genre: Class Differences, Class Issues, Free Indirect Style, Gen, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 08:40:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9987590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: '...in the closet (the one used by guests just off the hall) he'd had the boy put out scented soap (Coty Chypre) and a little pink hand towel which was obviously brand new. I had the feeling it had been bought especially for the occasion. (The soap in his own bathroom was Lifebuoy, so don't jump to the wrong conclusion!)' -- Daphne Manners to Lady Manners, 17th July 1942.And as Sister Ludmila notes, Ronald Merrick 'looked right but he did not smell right [...] he smelt all wrong.'*Note: usually I use 'is his own exhaustive list of content warnings' as a bit of a joke. It's not a joke here, but I think the tags more or less cover it.





	

Imagine him, then, on his knees, reaching into the black tin trunk. The aspect he presents is absurd, the wide-legged shorts and thin stockinged calves of a little boy uncertainly scaled up to the proportions of a tall, rangy man. More than absurd, uncanny. The angle of his boots against the floor recall a string puppet collapsed, broken even. Something additional to native rigour tautens the rack of his shoulders. It is self-consciousness, though he is alone. He has not quite cast off the habit of doing things for himself, a demeaning self-reliance. He should have instructed the houseboy, in the bazaar Hindi that makes one side of his face twitch. The crude constructions and straitened vocabulary irritate him, but they are necessary to the maintenance of a crucial divide. An eager scholarship pupil, one in a succession of discarded selves, would have wished to impress with idiomatic flair. But that wouldn’t do now, meaning it would not impress others and would degrade him. He sets aside a Higher Standard Urdu grammar and two exercise books filled with clear, punctilious script, Roman and Perso-Arabic, remembering a narrow, ill-proportioned parlour stuffed with Berlin work and pottery figurines, the smell of beeswax contending with cabbage from the kitchen, newsprint and sweets from downstairs, a voice reading aloud from _Innocents Abroad_ , ‘Savon is a necessary de la vie to anybody but a Frenchman…’ It is his voice, was his, his unbroken voice. His voice broke late but almost overnight: he woke up one morning in a room that didn’t feel like it could ever be his, descended stairs that did not smell of newsprint and sweets, and said good morning, in his present clear and carrying baritone, to people to whom he was not related, nor tied by anything but obligation. His guardian’s mother shrieked, in amusement or alarm. The other change in his voice is the one that took the time, and will never be complete.

He takes out a volume of Emerson’s _Essays_. He doesn't need to open it to see the plate commending performance in the School Certificate, nor the page beginning ‘Society is a joint stock company…’ nor the one ending ‘Society is a wave…’ It appals him, a handbook of slave morality, the higher Samuel Smiles. But of course, Emerson was American. He did not see the exceptions, the ones who rise from the valley to the ridge, lifted by the ceaseless transfer of property, insulated by right and privilege, by indifference to anything but their own interest. And all the while striking attitudes of responsibility, affection, understanding, which are iterations, corruptions really, of a settled, imperturbable contempt. Contempt is at least pure. He recoils from the upper classes, but if he is not to drown, he must appropriate some of their buoyancy. _The men say, my dear fellow, and do nothing, so—try the women. Would you believe it? I_ —he touches the inside of the trunk-lid at the spot where, on the outside, his Christian initial is stencilled— _I set the women to work_. 

Under a Harris tweed jacket he finds what he is looking for, a box about four inches wide and a foot long, with a brown base and cream-coloured lid. He brought it out here with him. It is a present that miscarried. That's as much as he's prepared to admit even to his own thoughts. The decoration on it is simple, a raised golden roundel containing the embossed brand name in one of those modern-primitive typefaces, _New York & Paris_ engraved in brown beneath. He can see how the mistake was made, but that does not mean it is forgivable. He lifts the lid to reveal cream tissue paper printed with the perfumer's name in gold. A French fascist who ran about half a dozen newspapers into the ground and lost his fortune in a divorce. Under the tissue paper lie three ovals of soap, each one wrapped in brown waxed paper with a sort of iridescent sheen to it. Gulab Singh stocks Yardley, and a step up, Floris, English scents that would sit easier on the English skin against which he will, in the event of success, have to lay his cheek, his lips. The minimum order of a dozen would have been a statement of serious intent, the sort of outlay that is a precondition to, if not a guarantor of, success. It is inconceivable that a man should be in possession of eleven unused bars of English Lavender or Rose Geranium and in want of a wife. These, musky, mentholated and earthy, are wrong. He thought this was the occasion on which he could begin to dispose of them, and he’s blundered, made a misstep characteristic of his class, which is the one that keeps things for best. He can’t send the boy out again now, it’s too late. 

He closes the box and puts it on the floor beside him. He weighs the faux pas against the different one of presenting his guest with a bar of his own carbolic, and decides to risk vulgarity. Quite apart from the discourtesy, he doesn't want her to smell like a nurse, or like a man. In the event, that is, of success. The possibility has receded but it is not altogether remote. A proposal is doubtless a rarity to her, perhaps even a first. She is not attractive. That doesn't matter to him as it would to most men, and so he doesn't have gallantly to pretend that he has not noticed her big bones and feet, her awkward stoop, her short sight. It excites her relief, and from relief proceeds gratitude. If she is honest, and she is, she will admit she is grateful, as a thirsty man is especially grateful for water when it is offered by the hand which has withheld it from him. At that point the need for external chastisement ceases: the subject takes on that function in the effort to recover self-respect. That is the sort of control he will need to exert, if he is to assume his place, and not drown. She may come to see him as her liberator from a hazardous and unsavoury association, and if that happens it will be a subsidiary benefit. But it is not the main thing, which is to keep people thinking they have something to prove. Not to him. To themselves. Then hatred means as little as love. 

He shuts the trunk, leaving the books and some other masculine detritus on the floor. The cords in his neck stiffen at this action, contrary to his tidy nature, but it is its own sort of discipline. He places the box of soap on top of the trunk, goes to the door and calls the houseboy. 

‘Sahib?’ 

‘Put a bar of that soap in the W.C., with one of the new hand towels. Pack the trunk again. And lay out my dinner jacket.’ 

The houseboy’s smile is loathsomely conspiratorial, representing the greatest possible ascendancy of condescension over resentment available to an inferior in this situation. Queer, that a black face does not make it any easier to forget that it is thus that your father must have smiled, at young men obliterated by Gallipoli, Passchendaele, and the Somme. Or so you imagine.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title, from Andrew Marvell, 'An Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland': 'The same arts that did gain/A pow’r, must it maintain.'
> 
> As far as I know, [Coty Chypre](http://www.basenotes.net/ID10210824.html) was never in fact made as a soap. The packaging and scent profile I have imagined is based on that of the 1917 perfume, not the 1960s reissue.
> 
> 'The men say, my dear fellow, and do nothing, so—try the women. Would you believe it? [...] I set the women to work,' quoting (selectively) Conrad, _Heart of Darkness_.
> 
> A French fascist: In reality, François Coty only ran two newspapers into the ground.
> 
> The Emerson essay in question is 'Self-Reliance', quotations from which are a motif in the _Raj Quartet_.


End file.
